I would guess that they’ll be sourcing a next-gen RISC-V processor ASAP, since those will enable virtualisation. If they stick one in a laptop shell I’d probably buy it pretty quickly. Doubly so if it has EFI.

I write developer tools. When I was doing web stuff I hated my job.

Man I’m so glad I love my job.

Art isn’t open source, right?

I’m sure I’ll get shouted down for this suggestion by the haters, but I’m going to make it anyway because it’s actually really good:

Use an Ubuntu LTS flavour like Kubuntu. Then, add flatpak and for apps you want to keep up to date, install either the flatpak or the snap, depending on the particular app. In my personal experience, sometimes the flatpak is better and sometimes the snap is better. (I would add Nix to the mix, but I wouldn’t call it particularly easy for beginners.)

This gets you:

1. A reliable Debian-like base that you only have to upgrade to new releases every 2 years
2. Up-to-date apps, including confinement for those apps
3. New kernels every 6 months (if you choose - you don’t have to, though)

If there were an occasional thing where I looked at it and thought “wait, is this Loss?” that would be funny. But I see them way too frequently for them to be funny. They need to be subtle and occasional, taking one off guard. Instead they’re frequent and unsubtle.

Yeah, Arch isn’t exactly an easy install for beginners.

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to reveal to the world that your butt is an outie

Lol imagine a canonical employee using nixos

Unfortunately not

I also wanted to do this when my cat sent by Steam Deck flying across the room and cracked the screen

Uhh this is a bottle stopper

And they’re providing Ubuntu for free. If you were a paying customer and the contract you’d signed with them said they’d provide Firefox as a deb, that would be a different situation.

I agree, but unfortunately our opinions don’t move a gazillion finance bros

over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you),

You don’t need to lie. A full list of debs that have been transitioned to snaps is:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Chromium

as you can see on other comments I’m not alone with that stance.

Being in the majority doesn’t necessarily make one right, as shown by [insert election result you disagree with here]. But if you actually are serious about that, you do realise how entitled it sounds to demand that someone do free work for you in the particular way you want it done?

And I believe you mean prerogative.

Yes, you are literally forcing me to accept your dollarinos, which, unless I exchange them MYSELF, are USELESS!

Hold on, have I fallen for Poe’s law?

If I were giving you €50/month, and then one day I decided to give you USD$55 instead, am I “forcing” you to accept US currency? No, I’m choosing to give you something I don’t have to give you in the first place in a different form. You can always reject my offer. You can ask someone else to give you €50/month.

They’re choosing how they want to provide Firefox. If anyone else wants to provide Firefox differently, Canonical isn’t stopping them. In fact, Canonical literally hosts and does the builds for an unofficial Firefox repo with their free Launchpad service.

Distributions decide what they want to package and how to package it all the time. Pretty much every time, someone is upset. But that upset is generally based on an unreasonable sense of entitlement.

I don’t believe Flatpak has the ability to package something like node. It certainly can’t package kernels or system services (at least not without leaving the user with a ton of manual work to do that would make it not much better than getting a tarball).

sure, and convince people to switch. it’s been done before of course but it’s a big effort

I agree! But this, IMO, is a better argument for how flathub.org being (theoretically) open source doesn’t actually make it any better than snapcraft.io. The technical hurdle, either of writing another snap store or of setting up a flatpak host, pales in comparison to the social hurdle of getting people to switch. Which is likely why the previous open snap store implementation died. Nobody wanted to host their own and convince people to switch, because at the end of the day there wasn’t any benefit.

that does not mean that the particular developer agrees with or even approves of the snap thing.

Never said it did, although in the particular case of the developer I mentioned, he’s also an Ubuntu Core developer, which depends entirely on snaps. I can’t imagine he’d have put himself in that position if he were particularly anti-snap

steam was a big one that a friend had trouble with, and they just installed that though apt i’m pretty sure.

Ubuntu has never had a steam package in their apt repos, and the steam-installer package still behaves the same way as ever. Personally, I do use the Steam snap and haven’t had any issues with it, though I do know that others have.

Uhm… and why does the user have to transition to snaps?

They don’t. But Canonical will no longer be providing debs in primary Ubuntu repositories, so those transitional packages exist so that users don’t wind up with an abandoned, old version of Firefox.

Why does Canonical provide those transitional packages while there are perfectly valid debs for the same thing?

For the same reason neither Ubuntu nor Debian provide debs for Google Chrome, despite Google having an official apt repository? Those debs exist in somebody else’s apt repository. If you want to add that apt repository, you’re welcome to. But those external packages aren’t part of the system they provide.

you instantly refute yourself, kudos!

Your unwillingness to accept what I’m saying doesn’t make what I’m saying contradictory.